Bank On This

In praising Gordon Brown, Linda Riordan, MP for Halifax and erstwhile researcher to Alice Mahon, had her fist in a velvet glove. But it was a fist of iron. She called explicitly for him, a Prime Minister from the near orbit of Edinburgh, to guarantee financial services jobs in Halifax.

The full nationalisation of Lloyds TSB, and thus of HBOS, should lead to the re-constitution of the Halifax Building Society, as the template for rebuilding the highly localised mutual movement throughout the country. That would be the right thing to do. And Gordon Brown should consider that it might also save a previously super-safe seat, plus at a hell of a push at least one neighbouring marginal as well.